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IBM InfoSphere DataStage vs Talend Data Fabric comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM InfoSphere DataStage
Ranking in Data Integration
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Talend Data Fabric
Ranking in Data Integration
27th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of IBM InfoSphere DataStage is 3.5%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Talend Data Fabric is 0.9%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM InfoSphere DataStage3.5%
Talend Data Fabric0.9%
Other95.6%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Swetha S - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution streamlines design, development, and deployment with effective ETL features
The support has been really good. Typically, if we have any issues, we raise a ticket with IBM, and they help us resolve the issues if required. We also have the flexibility to submit a feature request to be included as part of the wishlist, potentially becoming a product feature in subsequent releases.
KrishnaBaddam - PeerSpot reviewer
Supports API integrations and enables users to handle data management
Informatica is a well-established product known for its stability. Hardware and configuration can affect its performance, and it's not a lightweight tool that will fail quickly. When purchasing Informatica, you have options based on your needs. A simple data ingestion or integration license is relatively affordable, but the full Data Fabric suite is expensive. The Data Fabric suite includes integration, data quality, API management, big data processing, and real-time capabilities. For those who don't need the entire suite, purchasing individual components, such as data integration or data quality, it is a more cost-effective option. These individual licenses are generally less expensive than the complete Data Fabric suite, offering a more flexible and budget-friendly choice than Informatica's flagship.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Once you have Infosphere up and running properly, it is stable."
"I am impressed with the tool's ETL tracing."
"The most valuable feature is the product's versatility to inject data."
"ETL is the most valuable feature."
"We can view what we want to do. We can transform data and put them on tables."
"The solution has improved the time it takes to perform tasks related to batch applications."
"It is quite useful and powerful."
"As a data integration platform, it is easy to use. It is quite robust and useful for volumetric analysis when you have huge volumes of data. We have tested it for up to ten million rows, and it is robust enough to process ten million rows internally with its parallel processing. Its error logging mechanism is far simpler and easier to understand than other data integration tools. The newer version of InfoSphere has the data catalog and IDC lineage. They are helpful in the easy traceability of columns and tables."
"The initial setup is very easy."
"The Talend data integration has been one of the most valuable features."
"Everything in Talend Data Fabric is GUI-based, making it very user-friendly and easy to learn quickly."
"Talend can be used for multi-cloud purposes, allowing users to orchestrate data across various cloud platforms without purchasing AWS Glue, Azure Data Factory, or similar cloud-specific tools."
"We've had no issues with the stability so far."
"It is a smart tool for us to design data pipelines. It lets us populate our three data lake instances. We like this solution for its connection capabilities, since it is very important to be able to use many different types of software. We tested a lot of SAP sources successfully, including cloud sources with SAP. It is also very easy to anonymize data with TIBCO, as well as populating HDFS files, packet files, and raw files. It is very easy to do that with Talend Data Fabric."
 

Cons

"What needs improvement in IBM InfoSphere DataStage is its pricing. The pricing for the solution is higher than its competitors, so a lot of the clients my company has worked with prefer other tools over IBM InfoSphere DataStage because of the high price tag. Another area for improvement in the solution stems from a lot of new types of databases, for example, databases in the cloud and big data have become available, and IBM InfoSphere DataStage is working on various connectors for different data sources, but that still isn't up-to-date, meaning that some connectors are missing for modern data sources. The latest version of IBM InfoSphere DataStage also has a complex architecture, so my team faced frequent outages and that should be improved as well."
"The interface needs improvement."
"In the future, I would like to see more integration with cloud technologies."
"It would be useful to provide support for Python, AR, and Java."
"The troubleshooting guide is very bad."
"Its documentation is not up to the mark. While building APIs, we had a lot of problems trying to get around it because it is not very user-friendly. We tried to get hold of API documentation, but the documentation is not very well thought out. It should be more structured and elaborate. In terms of additional features, I would like to see good reporting on performance and performance-tuning recommendations that can be based on AI. I would also like to see better data profiling information being reported on InfoSphere."
"They can provide better support for non-IBM tools when it comes to the target."
"The solution should be more user-friendly."
"The support is not very good. The team is not well-trained, and resolving a ticket can require several discussions."
"We are currently using version 7.3.1, but preferred the version before. The problem that we currently have is that Talend are releasing patches for Talend Studio every quarter. Our technical team has to be on top of these patches and constantly ensure everything is updated."
"I would like to see better integration with other tools."
"We encounter issues getting email notifications. They should provide enough information about the configuration process for email components."
"Talend's architecture is complex to configure, especially due to the various components involved. It requires a more intricate setup."
"Deployment can be difficult, but I didn't test the latest version yet. With Talend products, every release brings a lot of new features and functionalities. This is never a small adaptation, because the tool is maturing, but we need to test the latest version and to check its deployment capabilities."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is expensive but there are no licensing fees."
"Small and medium-sized companies cannot afford to pay for this solution."
"The pricing is competitive but on the higher side of the pricing scale."
"I have no information on the exact pricing for IBM InfoSphere DataStage because the solution is usually procured by the clients my company works with, though the pricing is higher compared to other solutions, so many clients choose to go with a different solution rather than IBM InfoSphere DataStage."
"The solution is cheap."
"Our internal team takes care of group licensing and cost. We don't have individual licenses. We have group licensing at the company level. Usually, IBM doesn't charge anything separately on the licensing side. For storage and everything else, we are paying around $6,000 per month, which is not very high. It includes Linux data storage, execution, and licensing. They're charging $40 for one-hour execution. Based on that, we are spending around $2,000 on the production environment and $1,000 on the lower environment for testing and development-side executions. For the mainframe, we are using the Db2 mainframe database, and we are spending around $1,000 on the Db2 mainframe database as well. All this comes out to be around $6,000. We, however, would like to have some cost reduction."
"It's quite expensive."
"It is quite expensive."
"There are multiple subscriptions available with Talend, each with its own scope. Subscriptions depend on the number of users you have and how many remote engines you want to install."
"There are no additional licensing fees when you scale"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Educational Organization
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise25
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

Would you upgrade to more premium versions of IBM InfoSphere DataStage?
My company currently uses the free version of the product, and we are definitely switching to a paid one. We needed a tool that can help us not only integrate our data but use it effectively. For ...
Is IBM InfoSphere DataStage more difficult to use compared to other tools in the field?
I think the tool may cause some difficulties if you have not used other data integration solutions before. I have worked at companies that used different tools for data integration, and they work ...
Do you rely on IBM Cloud Paks for your data? Have you utilized this product, or do you use IBM InfoSphere DataStage without it?
IBM Cloud Paks makes a big difference in your data integration. My company has been using it alongside IBM InfoSphere DataStage and while the main product is good on its own, this one truly expands...
What needs improvement with Talend Data Fabric?
Data governance is still not mature. There is not much documentation available for it, and the maturity of the product does not meet my expectations. Master Data Management has been decommissioned,...
What is your primary use case for Talend Data Fabric?
The main use cases for Talend Data Fabric include setting up a data lake to enable the data platform.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dubai Statistics Center, Etisalat Egypt
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM InfoSphere DataStage vs. Talend Data Fabric and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,654 professionals have used our research since 2012.